Do social interactions and project ownership promote student success?
by Dr. Mallory White -- I teach an introductory animal science course with mostly first-year students at Virginia Western Community College (VWCC), and some students have never given a formal individual presentation. In previous years, students would fail to do a presentation because it was too intimidating. Retention rates for these students dropped, and some did not return the next semester. To increase student success rates for final presentation projects, I implemented two strategies: social interaction and student ownership. First, social interactions are an important strategy to promote success in community college students. Many develop support networks that can span their entire college career ( Karp, 2016 ). Rather than assigning individual presentations, students worked in groups of 3 to 4. To help address pitfalls related to group presentations, such as unequal contribution and social loafing , up to 20% of their grade was based on peer evaluation, which motivated indiv